Like the Wind Reminds Me
by polar-realm
Summary: T'Pring/McCoy. A late night conversation on a newly settled world.


T'Pring had not read a word on the PADD she was holding for the past three minutes and twenty-seven seconds, and the last sentence she had read, she had read twice. Her eyes skimmed over the looping script line by line, and registered nothing but the arc and sweep of electronic ink, the arbitrary pieces of a puzzle of sufficient difficulty to distract her. She let the PADD fall to the scored surface of the desk, and pressed her fingers to her temples to still the ache building there, hissing like static over a broken comlink. Such was the price of a severed bond, after half a lifetime of connection. It would fade, in time, and she had never once doubted that the cost was worth the gain. But she was tired now, and it was late, and a deep, steady silence had settled over the walled city, leaving her at a loss for word or thought or clarity.

_Uzhaya_, they called this place. Renewal. It sounded strange to her, hollow as words shouted into a canyon, and illogical as it was, she thought she might have preferred it if the Council had left this world with no name at all. She longed for the bright, clean heat of a desert that did not exist any longer, the uncomplicated logic of a world that had been burned out of this timeline entirely. She knew that sleep would serve her well. She was no untrained child, and sleep, like every other physical function, should accede to her will without effort or strain. But rest, like discipline, had been proving elusive these days, and she knew that if she remained where she was, there would be no sleep for her tonight.

No difficulty, then, in the decision to step outside, into the silence, no ambiguity in the desire to leave the city behind. She made her way through dusty streets that were not quite deserted, between red stone buildings and courtyards, heading for the edge of the small city. Men and women drifted past, cloaked in their own silence and going about their own business. No one stopped her, or said a word; she sensed their eyes on her, but no judgment. Perhaps it was a peculiarity specific to this far village, which, like so many places on the outskirts of the settlement, tended to draw in outsiders. Even the sentinels at the gate only offered her the familiar salute as she passed, acknowledging her presence, her restlessness and her right to go where she would.

The land outside the wall was red and gold around her, rocky terrain gradually falling away into unbroken stretches of sand along the far horizon. Spiny desert plants grew at intervals in the cracked ground, and clumps of small, wiry trees and bushes grew along the edges of a ravine, drinking in the water that ran beneath. She walked until the settlement fell out of sight behind a high ridge, granting the illusion of solitude without the danger of being truly alone on a newly settled world. And then she sat and leaned back against the rock face, letting the last remnants of the city's mental resonance dissipate into the atmosphere. It was the price of living in a colony of grieving telepaths, she knew. That pain permeated everything, but out here, in this emptiness, it seemed to hold less weight.

She sat for a long time with arms folded up around her knees and eyes half-closed, lost in meditation, before she heard a small noise carried on the desert wind. Footsteps. She looked up at the sound, moving into the balance of a combat stance even as she rose. Instinct. Instinct only, but it was not irrational that she should react so, even when there was no threat to be expected. She drew in a deep breath of cold air and willed herself to calm, suppressing a shiver with only a little effort. The human man who was standing on the ridge above her chuckled wryly, lines creasing his weathered face and moonlight limning his dusty hair.

"Dr. McCoy," she said, and he greeted her with a brief nod of his head.

"T'Sai T'Pring. Mind if I join you?" McCoy spoke courteously, soft Terran accent wrapping around the syllables of her name. There were no angles or hard edges to his words, nothing sharp or demanding, even as some untranslatable emotion flickered across his face and was gone.

He was just about the opposite, it occurred to her, of Spock.

"It is, as you say, _a free planet_," she said, allowing herself a sliver of satisfaction at applying the doctor's native idiom correctly – _North American, yes, and English_ – and a moment of detached amusement as the literal meaning of the phrase registered. It wasn't, precisely, if truth be told – though truth seldom had been, even before the cataclysm. There were all too many rules in their settlement of late, things forbidden and permitted, things required. But those rules did not yet apply out here on the fringes, and if she was in any way successful in her aims, they never would.

McCoy clambered down from the ledge, cursing beneath his breath as he slipped on loose sand and sent pebbles cascading down the slope. He was carrying a blanket, which he spread out on the ground, muttering about alien parasites and danger and darkness and how _god knows what_ could be living in that sand. Snakes, probably. Alien microbes, without a doubt. It was a curious act, and if there was logic there she did not know how to place it, even as she listened with fascination to his litany of creative profanity and paranoia. She observed him as he sat down beside her, trying to determine what had brought him out here, whether it had been on an errand or merely some unaccountable human whim, but his words offered no indication of purpose.

The Enterprise's other human physician, Doctor M'Benga, she understood. That one was calm and collected, Vulcan-trained and almost Vulcan himself in his discipline. McCoy was an unsolved equation, deceptively simple on the surface, and like every other poorly understood phenomenon, he was best approached with caution. But for all that logic demanded distance, she recalled his work in the medical center in the months after the cataclysm, keeping tripple shifts when there was no one else to do the work that was needed, his unpracticed words and the lives he had saved. She did not understand him, precisely, but he was a difficult man not to respect.

"Somethin' on your mind, T'Sai?" he asked.

"Consideration of the hypothetical, Doctor. That is all."

"How so?"

"It is not meaningful."

"I doubt that," he said.

"Have you ever wondered if we might have saved Vulcan?"

She had not planned to say it. It was the sort of futile speculation that she usually set aside before carrying out whatever necessary work was at hand. Spock would have said it was illogical to concern oneself with what could not be changed. He would have said it, but he would not have meant it.

"You know, Jim's been wondering the same thing," McCoy said. "It's like the goddamned Kobayashi Maru all over again. No way to win and everybody knows it, but he just can't let it go."

"I empathize," she said softly. "It is difficult not to speculate on what might have been. Had we of Vulcan acted more quickly, or logically, what might have been prevented?"

McCoy laughed, low and rough in his throat, gently cynical. "I don't know about logic, but if we of Earth had been just a little quicker, we would all be dead." He took a silver hip flask from his pocket and drank, long and deep. "Kind of funny, that. The quick and the dead. Not all that damn much separating them, when it comes right down to it."

T'Pring didn't know if there was anything at all to say to that, so she fell silent again. McCoy looked at her, then looked away just as quickly, shaking his head for some reason she could not discern.

"I don't know how to talk about this," he said. "Never have. I'm a doctor, all right? Not a damned psychiatrist."

"Inaccurate," she said. "I have seen your file. You were licensed before you enlisted."

"Yeah, well," he lifted his flask in a mock salute and then drank. "We all do stupid things when we're young. Right?"

"Perhaps so." A dry weariness slipped into her voice from somewhere, giving her words a layer of meaning she had not intended. And when had she become so lax as to wear her emotions openly like that? Self-control had been proving difficult, in the wake of all their loss, but that did not grant any dispensation for failure. But McCoy did not seem to notice her slip – no doubt it would not even be one, on his world. He offered her the flask with a tired smile, and she took it, tipped it back and felt the smoky liquid slide down her throat, burning and warming her from the inside out. The warmth from his hand lingered in the silver metal, oddly but not uncomfortably intimate, sending a slow shiver up her spine.

"Do you mind if I ask you something that's none of my damn business?"

She looked at him flatly. "You are a doctor, are you not?"

"Glad to see somebody's finally noticed," he said.

"So ask."

He was silent for a long while, almost long enough for her to believe he had decided against saying anything at all. Then he laughed again – such a foreign sound, that human noise of amusement, all raw, primitive impulse, by its nature uncontrolled. She wasn't certain whether she found it fascinating, disturbing, or some indefinable measure of both. The more she considered it, the more it seemed that the same could be said of him.

"To hell with it. Why'd they really send you out here?"

"Clarify, doctor."

"I thought you'd say that. See, it's like this. I remember you. You're more of a walking calculator than Spock is, and your bedside manner ain't worth shit, and after a man's been subjected to logic applied with the force and subtlety of a blunt instrument to the back of the head, well, it's memorable." He took a deep breath, and then met her eyes, in that peculiar gesture of combined respect and appraisal that she had encountered from humans before. "And then I stop by the hospital to see how they're getting along down there, and it turns out they've packed their most goddamn _efficient _physician off the fringes for lacking in logic or some such malarky, and that... well, that ain't logical in itself, if you don't mind my saying so. It don't sit right."

"I follow the disciplines of Surak, no less than any Vulcan," she said coolly. "I merely disagree with their current application."

"So it's political, is it?"

"Yes," she said. "It is, as you say, political." She was not the only outsider in this far territory, nor the only – the thought perturbed her, even as she was forced to acknowledge the truth of it _– _nor the only _dissident_. She wondered, briefly, how much she could say to him without consequence, until it occurred to her how much of an anomaly it was that she had considered the possibility at all. Council politics were subtle, restrained, but that did not mean that threat was absent in these unsettled times, and Vulkhansu law and custom were not for an offworlder to meddle in.

She regarded him carefully, all his rough edges and the shadows beneath his eyes, the fine lines at the corners of his eyes. There was something unexpectedly compelling in the thought of that tenuous physicality, his thin shoulders, light and fragile bones. She could hurt this human doctor, if she chose to. She was not certain what her awareness of that fact said about her own nature, or the fact that she found the thought of it a comfort. Nevertheless, that awareness was there: she could hurt him. If she chose to.

It would be a simple thing to slip in beneath the surface of his thoughts, and see to it that his conjectures, his suspicions, were erased without trace. But simple was not always wise, and the thought of it was unexpectedly, viscerally aversive, in a way that cut beneath logic, into something more instinctive and far more treacherous.

A Federation contact might prove useful one day. That was reason enough to let him keep his memories, however much a risk they might be. Only that. No more was needed. But McCoy was watching her with some indecipherable Terran emotion, worn too openly on his face, and she knew that whatever the logic of it, whatever the lack of logic, she would not betray this man.

"Are you alright, T'Sai?," he asked, sliding effortlessly back into formality, and she was left with the unanticipated, unfounded conviction that he would offer her no betrayal either.

"I am well, doctor," she said, tilting her head to one side. After a moment's consideration, she added, "and you may refer to me as T'Pring."

He nodded slowly, and shifted in place beside her, as if she had just handed him something much heavier than he had anticipated. Perhaps she had. It hadn't been her intention, but some things, it was easy to forget the true weight of.

"Hey, T'Pring?"

"Yes?"

"Look up."

She did. The sky was black above them, lit by trails and points of light in a deep, cold, immeasurably vast vacuum. All the angles she drew between those points were different from the ones she remembered, but that much was well known to her – a discrepancy familiar enough that it took her a moment to register that this time, when she mapped the geometry of the sky in her mind, she did not percieve it as wrong.

"I had been under the impression that you considered space displeasing," she said softly.

"I do," he said. "When I'm up there in it. But from down here, with both your feet on good solid ground, well. It's different."

"Yes," she said. "Perhaps it is." And perhaps it was. But solid ground could shift quickly, collapse on itself, leaving rifts and chasms where sand and stone had been only seconds before. She had seen it happen. She was certain she would see it happen again. She ought to remember that, and step away from this, set aside the consideration of void and perspective until morning when everything would be clearer. Instead, she brought a hand to his face, tracing the line of his jaw, feeling rough stubble beneath her fingers. His mind was there at the borders of her consciousness, but she held back from it, unwilling to press too close. There was a moment, only a human heartbeat's time, when he did not move, barely breathed, and she did not pull him close, but she did not push him away. Then he stood abruptly and stepped back, his sudden absence reminding her of how long it had been since she had allowed anyone to lay a hand on her, or stand close enough for her to feel their body heat in the chill of the desert night, the unbidden memory of a warmth she still hungered for.

He looked at her for a moment, frowning in that human way of his, like he was working through some complicated puzzle with no solution anywhere in sight. And then his expression shifted, the lines at the corners of his mouth easing, and he leaned down and held out a hand to help her to her feet.

She was not ignorant of what the gesture meant on his world, in his culture. He could not be ignorant of what it meant in hers.

And she was... not displeased by it. The prospect. The memory of this man's skin beneath her fingers, and the lingering taste of Terran liquor on her tongue, the unfamiliar cadence of an alien heartbeat and a body too long accustomed to weariness. Human-frail, yes, but human-strong, and impossibly tenaceous. As all life was, and that, too, was a thing she needed to remember. One second passed, and another, and then she let herself reach out to clasp his hand tightly and rise to stand beside him.

"I would not be averse," she said, arching one eyebrow, "to continuing this conversation elsewhere."

"Neither would I," he said, with a rueful laugh. "This and other conversations. I think we've got a lot to talk about, the two of us."

"Perhaps we do, at that," she said. The night was halfway over now, the first moon falling low in the sky and the second already beginning to rise on the horizon, and soon enough it would be morning. But there was time enough, she thought, looking out at the sweep of desert around them, the jagged arc of mountains, and hearing the fragments of some old human verse slipping through her mind. _Time enough, and world._

McCoy's hand was warm in hers, strong and solid, and when she considered the thought of him beside her, she could not help but decide that her earlier assessment was correct. The prospect was not displeasing at all.

A/N: Another reference to Andrew Marvell's poem _To His Coy Mistress_, because apparently I am all about that poem in relation to this character. Yeah.

Title taken from Kate Wolf's excellent song _Desert Wind_


End file.
